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We’re delighted to announce the release of our first full-colour guidebook and plans for an ongoing series.

Our guide to Flores and Komodo (and surrounds) is designed for the iPad and iPad mini, with PDF versions for other tablets, smartphones and printers. This is our most ambitious release yet and replaces our iPhone guides, which we retired last week.

Our first full colour guide: Flores & Komodo

Our first guide is 59 pages and covers the key destinations for most first-time visitors to Flores and Komodo. It offers comprehensive travel planning information for people heading to the region, with detailed accommodation reviews, food and activities information, and simple maps, with all accompanied by beautiful photos that showcase the stunning nature of the region.

Different layouts depending on what your needs.

As is always the case with Travelfish.org, we pay our own way — without exception — and our researchers have visited everywhere you’ll read about in this guide. If you haven’t been there, you haven’t been there. We have.

Best of all, the guide is 100% free.

A second, less orthodox facet of our new free travel guides is that, unlike some publishers, we’d love readers — and other publishers — to share them.

Want to email a copy to your friend? Go for it.

Finished your trip? Hand it/email it to a new arrival you meet at the airport.

Meet one of the guides we mention or stay at a place we list? Give them a copy.

Have a website and want to distribute it? Go for it.

Have a newsletter and want to use the guide as a way to get people to sign up? Go for it.

Have a trip planning website and want to provide your readers with a useful guide? Go for it.

While we’d love it if you gave us a link back to our free travel guides page in return, this isn’t a requirement. We’d also love it if you let us know.

The only things we ask in return is that:

* You do NOT extract information out of the guides into other products, websites, soup-can labels or anything else.

* You do NOT manipulate the PDF in any manner in order to remove branding or and other content within. The guides as they are contain minimal Travelfish.org branding.

* They MUST remain free – don’t charge people for something we’re giving you for free. That’s extremely uncool.

These type of activities are strictly prohibited.

So what’s next?

More titles for starters — in the pipeline right now are guides to some Thai and Cambodian islands, a few markets in Bangkok and a bit of motorbiking in Laos. Plus, a version for the Kindle is coming in the not too far future — though they won’t be nearly as pretty as these ones, unfortunately.

We’re excited. Way back in the early days of Travelfish.org we did free PDF guides, then we did even better paid-for ones. Then we upgraded to iPhone apps, and now we think we’re producing our best product yet — and it’s free.

Catchy title I know. In another bout of procrastination I ran the homepages of a bunch of travel websites and blogs through the “Speed test” tool at Pingdom. I did this primarily because Travelfish.org has a rather chunky homepage and I was wondering if I should spend time re-assessing it to reduce the size so it would load faster. So I ran our homepage along with a bunch of other travel websites and it seems that in most cases, travel websites are not all that worried about having a homepage over one meg in size.

The notable outlier was Travellerspoint, which manages to run a homepage a fraction of the size of any of the others I tested, but their load time was only in the middle of the range — get more hamsters into that server!

TP aside, it does seem that everyone else reckons the readers will wait while they bulk out the homepage with big images, Facebook and Google plugins and so on — isn’t anybody reading Jakob Nielsen?

Some of the websites mentioned obviously will have far higher traffic numbers and I assume server load, but likewise I assume TripAdvisor has a few more hamsters in their server than some of the smaller sites listed. Because of this I ordered them by Pingdom’s “Performance grade” which takes into account a number of features in deriving a final score.

As traffic levels to these sites will vary over time through the day, I’ve linked to the actual Pingdom results are after the image. Through those links you can access Pingdom’s history tool to see historic results for a domain (in some cases I had to run the test a couple of times to get a usable result).

Regular Travelfish readers may know that we have a regular newsletter that we send out every Monday (well sometimes Tuesday if things get out of hand). It’s a wrap on what is happening both at Travelfish HQ and on the Travelfish.org website along with a roundup on interesting news and writing on the region. You can read a previous issues here.

We’ve thousands of subscribers and thankfully have new people subscribing daily.

Not surprisingly we also have people unsubscribing (luckily not on a daily basis). After all, we’re a travel website focused on a single part of the world and for some people, once they complete their trip, the newsletter loses an element of its relevance. But there do seem to be many armchair travellers or repeat Asia visitors out there — which is great to know!

When people unsubscribe, they’re given the option to let us know why they’re unsubscribing. We thought what better way to help you decide if you should subscribe was to let you know why people unsubscribe.

So here’s a selection of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. While this is just a selection, it is roughly in proportion to the total numbers of unsubscribes we get.

The Good
“It’s too upsetting to read about Southeast now I am no longer able to go.”

“I’m leaving SE Asia in a couple of days, and I fear reading your blog will not help my withdrawal. Give me a couple months and I’ll be back. Travelfish is an excellent resource.”

“Not travelling at the moment or in the near future and its sad to read everything!”

“Loved reading your travel news but we are going away in a few days time and will not have internet access (apart from spasmodic visits to Maccas!) for some months – will be back to subscribe when we have finished travelling, as your info is excellent – can relate to so many of the articles. Thanks very much, and great to know you are expanding.”

“Your newsletter was great, but my times of travelling are over now.”

“Finished 4 years of travelling Awesome site!!!!!!!! Used it always on our trip”

“No travel plans for some time. Great help for my recent trip to Thailand though…”

“Great site…..going to South America – I will subscribe when SE Asia is on my radar again”

“I am unlikely to be travelling again for a long period. However the emails were very interesting and useful when I needed them!”

“Not in Asia anymore! Brilliant website though and will be back!”

“We came back from travelling and it’s depressing me having to read about all these wonderful places.”

“I have completed my travels of Southeast Asia for a few years. I’ll start up again when i decide to go back to SE Asia. I really enjoyed the newsletters.”

“Fantastic read when I was planning my trip to SE Asia. Thank you!”

“Not currently planning a trip as I just got back from Vietnam and Cambodia but will be subscribing when I go again. Great newsletter, thanks.:) was very useful and insightful”

“No longer relevant as traveling in Europe – loved the letter/website though and will use the website again for future Asian travels.”

“Loved your newsletters. Found them interesting and informative. Not able to travel in near future now.”

“Very helpful newsletter! We went to SE Asia for 3 months last year. planning next trip now to different part of the world… thanks for your info.”

“You have developed a great website and I have used it wisely. My Asia travels are over for the next few years. Many thanks for your services.”

“Love it. Travelfish was amazing in helping to plan for our trip to Cambodia/Vietnam in Nov/Dec 2011. But now planning to go somewhere other than SE Asia. Thank you!”

“No more travel planned for the next year or so. Thanks for an excellent service . Love your regular newsletters!! Best wishes for the future. I’m spreading the word!”

“All of information I received was extremely useful. We completed our trip in April, jet lag was everlasting on return to the states, but worth it.”

“No trips planned to Southeast Asia for awhile – however – found Travelfish to be a terrific resource!!!!”

“We don’t need the information any more as we came back from our holiday a while ago. But it is a great newsletter, thank you.”

“I’ve finished travelling for the moment! But travelfish was extremely helpful!”

“Finished my trip to Asia. Now focusing on South America. Your site/newsletter is awesome and I will use it again and recommend it.”

“I have just been away and it’s too depressing to see such amazing places right now! I’ll re-subscribe for the next time. Brilliant site though.”

“It’s just that I won’t be going back to SE Asia in the near future — and seeing this every week makes me envious of those who are there! I still subscribe to you on Facebook.”

“Not planning to travel to Asia soon, but will definitely connect again when I plan to travel to that part of the world.”

“I am no longer traveling to SE Asia. If I plan another trip, I will plan on subscribing again.”

“I have stopped travelling for now and will subscribe when I need it again. Many thanks!”

The Bad
“Trivial content.”

“It was not an interesting read for us. Probably the writings are aimed at a different, less experienced audience.”

“Not that interesting”

“No time to read”

“Not relevant. Thanks.”

“Good info on Travelfish, but the newsletter not so good.”

“I don’t like to be pushed I like to choose who I deal with thank you.”

The Ugly
“YOU ARE JUST ADVERTISING STUFF NOT INFORMING OR EDUCATING US. I NEED MORE ADVERTS LIKE A HOLE IN THE HEAD. GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR BUSINESS AND THANKS FOR THE INFORMATION WE USED TO GET.” [THEIR CAPS!]

“Basically, Southeast Asia as a whole and especially Thailand are just jam-packed with rude, lewd, corrupt, slimy, putrid, sleazy, cheating ****. I have traveled far and abroad and in my well-travelled opinion, most of Asia and Southeast Asia should be widely avoided at all cost!” [**** added by us]

In conclusion
If you’ve read through the above and the newsletter sounds like your kind of thing (note you can read previous editions here to get a feel for what we’re doing), feel free to signup via the form below.

You can unsubscribe at any time and, as we’ve probably illustrated up top, we do read every single unsubscribe we receive!

Overnight rain here in Bali washed most of the pungent smoke out of the air from last night’s fireworks extravaganza and it looks like we’re settling in for one of those overcast with occasional shower type days, custom-designed for laying in bed doing not much at all. A contemplative day.

So with that in mind, here’s a bit of contemplation on where 2012 took Travefish.org.

This has been, without doubt, our busiest year ever and the site has grown beyond our expectations, through hard work, having an excellent team of writers and, without doubt, a bit of good fortune thrown in here and there.

Through the year, Samantha, as editor in chief, took over all editorial responsibilities of the site and managed our growing team of freelance correspondents, currently 19 in total, who are based across the region. We also took on our first staff writer, David.

Through the year we brought a number of our writers to Bali individually for a weeklong workshop, where we showed them more of the inner workings and tried to better explain the whats, hows and most importantly, whys of how things get done at Travelfish. In some cases, this gave us our first opportunity to meet people who had been working with us for long periods of time, and in all cases we think it was a great learning experience for everyone.

Personally I managed to fit in an uncomfortably frequent travel schedule, with nine trips to Malaysia, four to Thailand, three to Singapore and one apiece to Vietnam and Cambodia — yes Laos, I’ve not forgotten you — I’ll see you soon!

Between my and David’s travels along with the correspondents’ regular contributions to the Travelfish blogs, we published more than 1,100 stories and 34 features. Vast amounts of our destination research was also either updated or expanded, with Java and sections of Malaysia finally getting the attention they deserve. Yet there is plenty more to do — you should see the input queue! We also added our 5,500th property review in December 2012.

With all this new material we needed to take a far more structured approach to getting it from us to you. An editorial schedule appeared, and we made information available via Facebook and Twitter (and to a far lesser extent, Google+).

Samantha’s efforts with Facebook grew our overall likes to more than 11,500 (from 7,000 at the start of the year) and while we at times felt stymied by Facebook’s policies, we’ve rolled with the punches and continue to consider it an important channel for organic growth.

My Twitter addiction continues to grow at a gangrenous rate, with almost 13,000 followers, most of them possibly real (!). I thank you all for putting up with my blathering — well those who haven’t (justifiably) muted me anyway. The Travelfish Twitter stream is 100% me with a dash of Travelfish thrown in — nothing constructed. I think it’s useful to know, love and/or hate who the people are behind a brand — I hope most of you are in the former!

We also moved the on-again off-again newsletter to a firm, well almost firm, Monday weekly schedule and this has seen our email list grow by about 75% over the year. While it is tedious to do, people seem to love it — it’s the only thing we do where if we run late, real people actually email or tweet us asking where it is. We love you all Not a subscriber? You can sign-up here.

At the very tail end of 2012 we finally made some changes to the Travelfish forum, hoping to make it both easier to use for existing members and more enticing for potential new members. We’re allowing members to add in their social networks to better allow them to find like-minded travelling souls and we’ll be adding more features in the coming weeks.

Numbers wise, Travelfish.org saw continued steady growth traffic wise, receiving almost 8,000,000 visits in the year (up around 45% on 2011) and more than 20,000,000 pageviews (up about 20% on 2011). While member numbers continue to grow, we did see fewer new members compared to the year before (nice one Facebook!). We’ll be working hard to grow this further in 2013 by creating yet more reasons to make it worthwhile to become a Travelfish member.

Revenue-wise, despite losing long-time advertiser AirAsia in the first half of the year, overall revenue grew by about 70% and we believe we’re well positioned financially for 2013 and beyond. This is a great relief and has been a long time coming particularly as we adhere to a strict policy of never taking freebies.

So what does 2013 hold for Travelfish?

To a large extent, more of the same really. We’ll continue to build upon and add to the depth of our destination coverage. With seven writers based in Thailand alone, we have a lot of new material planned. We’re finally making progress filling out our Malaysia coverage and if you thought you heard a lot about Indonesia from us in 2012, you ain’t heard nothing yet. Indonesia is where independent travel is at! (We get a lot of people asking about The Philippines and Burma, and while we’d love to add them, 2013 won’t be the year this happens.)

This new year will also see us reinvigorate our existing iPhone apps, while iPad and Kindle users should (hopefully) have something to get pretty excited about soon as we finally firm up a concept we’ve been experimenting with for much of 2012.

But most importantly, what we’ll be concentrating on doing more than anything else, is helping travellers get the most out of their travels to Southeast Asia.

Because we want travellers to love Southeast Asia as much as we do.

Best wishes for a great 2013 to you all, thanks for your support, and good, safe travels,

The Travel Blog Camp twitter account later attributed it as “sort of a quote from @blogworld” and noted that “I think what he meant was if you want an audience you need to do SEO so that they can find you. Difficult to relay in 140.”

It’s an interesting one.

I think it is interesting because it’s painting SEO as some kind of additional thought process that needs to go into a post — kind of like you write the post and then you build an overlay of SEO over it. If that is how you are doing it, then in your case “doing SEO” is stupid.

For most of us mere mortals, simple SEO need not be a dark art — it can be if you want, but it need not be.

In most cases, use a good title that tells the reader what the story is about. Sure, nothing wrong with the occasional “Fergie Toe Job” title, but generally a more descriptive title is useful.

I read a great blog entry the other day by Gary Bembridge — I’d not heard of, nor read anything by Gary previously, which only made what he wrote all the more refreshing. The post, titled “Travel blogs, travel bloggers & travel blogging conferences are doomed” covered a range of bases that sorta get tossed around pretty frequently, but there was one section, in which he was talking about what goes on at the conferences, that really leapt out at me.

“I was surprised, especially with my marketing background, that there is limited discussion about what real travellers and everyday people are seeking in the form of information, advice, education and entertainment about travel. There is almost no discussion and no data on what the real target are consuming, enjoying, returning to, valuing and seeking. The focus is on more on what is “in it” for the blogger, so how to do better SEO, how to be a better writer (on assumption that real people are actually looking for that) and how to get tourists boards and brands to want to work with you.”

He’s talking about audience.

A common catchphrase (not just with blogging, but writing for the web in general) is write for the reader not Google, but there seems to be little discussion about who these readers actually are.

Who is our audience? Who is yours?

With online travel, I think generally speaking you can draw a line from left to right.

To the far left you’ve got the real inspirational/naval gazing stuff — for the readers who don’t know if they want to go to Peru, Paris or the Pharmacy. This might be your Sunday supplements, some mag at the hair salon or generic travel bloggers.

As you move to the centre, the readership becomes more specific and they might be interested in a diving supplement, an adventure travel magazine or a more specialised travel blogger — say one aimed at travelling with kids.

Further to the right again, they’re really narrowing down — picking up a destination specific magazine, reading a trip planning website or browsing a destination specific travel blog.

At the far right you’re got the transactional websites — be they flights, accommodation, tours and so on, where the reader has a pretty firm idea of what they want to do and has a credit card in their hand.

At each of these stages, the reader (be it on- or offline) is looking for inspiration, followed by more information, pretty much makes a decision and then finally wants someone to pay to make it happen.

So I return to my question who is our audience?

Is it what Google Analytics tells us? British, Australian and American, obsessed with weather, islands and where to score drugs in Cambodia?

Or is it what Facebook tells us? Thai, Indonesian and Australian fascinated with noodle soup and sunset pics.

Is it the blog traffic? More disasters involving copious amounts of water please.

There’s a certain amount you can infer from each of the above to try to better cater to the readers, and I guess it isn’t too difficult to double down on the material that people find the most interesting.

Or think about it another way. Who do you want your audience to be and where on the inspiration to transaction line do you want to be? If you’re trying to make a business out of this, you want to be as far to the right as you can.

1) I read last night about a travel start-up launching, in this case to become “the most current and trusted travel information provider on the planet”. They seem to be doing this in part by “sifting through” around a dozen other travel websites.

2) A week or so ago there was a somewhat unusual exchange on Travelfish.org regarding a new member who wanted to “mine” our information to produce their own PDF guides (which they would then sell).

3) A few months ago I was in Bangkok, talking to a writer for a top tier travel guide publisher who boasted that they love Travelfish.org because they just mine our site for all the places their publisher doesn’t pay them enough to visit in person.

In all three cases the focus is less on “putting feet on the ground” and gathering their own information — instead it is all about partnerships and reusing or, mining, existing data.

I think this is a badly missed opportunity.

We live in a time when travel has never been easier and more affordable yet there appears to be little interest in actually investing in improving the information that people use on the ground. There’s nothing wrong with user-generated content if it rocks your boat, but I’m talking about expert-generated content.

Online travel start-ups have raised millions in funding but I’m truly at a loss as to what they spend it on.

Words from Wikitravel, wCities, Footprint or Frommers, free photos from Flickr, free maps from Google and, of course, the great stub-filler, reviews from the general public.

Is it really that expensive to create your own content? To cover much of Southeast Asia you’d probably need a couple of hundred thousand dollars for good, conscientious writers to do a solid first run. When you’re raising eight figure sums I’d have thought that was doable. While information on Travelfish.org is far from perfect, we built what we did with far less than a single million and we’ve always paid our writers.

Perhaps it isn’t doable because, in the eyes of the founders, this information isn’t actually seen as being all that important. The words are there really just to funnel a Google search through to an adclick or a hotel reservation. Just enough words to dodge a Google Panda penalty (or, in some cases, not).

As for the guidebook publishers who no longer require their writers to actually visit all destinations (or in some cases, the country at all – no I’m not talking about Colombia Columbia!) then you fully deserve to be in the dire situation you are — you took your readers for granted and not surprisingly, they stopped buying your books.

Information is everything and if you haven’t been there, you haven’t been there.

What I’d love to see is a new travel start-up with the funding to really double down on the content and the people who research and create it rather than the technology that presents it. You don’t need a Pinterest mashup to find the post office — you just need an address.

There are more ways, and it is easier, to make money out of online travel content than it has ever been before. I say that with one caveat: you need to own the content to reap the full benefits.

Invest in your writers and the content, build something original that doesn’t solve a non-existent problem and be in it for the long term.

This is an exciting time to be in online travel — I just wish there were more new ideas and concepts to get excited about.

It’s basically a personal/project management package that allows you to set up various todo lists and share them with coworkers. I’d long been looking at various similar solutions, particularly Basecamp, but I’d found them too complicated for the fairly simple matters I need to get organised.

What makes Asana so awesome is its absolute simplicity. It has a flat interface in that everything gets shared with everyone, but as (at the moment) there are only three of us using it, that’s perfect.

Big picture, medium picture, detail.

At first glance Asana did my head in a little, but after watching the first two introduction videos and playing around with it for 15 minutes, it was all clear.

Essentially there are three panes. The left column has your broad task collections — the centre column shows you the tasks within one collection and the third shows the contents of a particular task.

The Asana whip-list for the day.

The third pane is the most useful as it is here the task gets detailed, assigned to a team member and the task path is recorded and displayed with progress notes and final status.

Organisation has never been a strong point for me, and Asana has brought a tremendous amount of clarity to what I’m doing, what I need to be doing and what can be filed away for a rainy day.

A detailed blame trail for why something isn’t done.

Aside from asigning tasks to team members, you can set deadlines (for others or yourself), sync to your calendar, set tasks to repeat (say preparing a newsletter) and use it for broader stroke big picture visualising what a new project or task may entail, then break it down into smaller chunks and eventually sprints. There’s also email notifications (yes, you can’t escape your tasks) and a bunch of other features I’m yet to fully explore.

Broad strokes.

The actual interface may look complicated, but, once you’re used to it, it’s extremely intuitive and dead easy to use — fast too.

Best of all?

It’s free.

If you’re looking for some kind of multi-user author tool and don’t need an overly complex solution, check Asana out — I highly recommend it.